Current events in the words of the students of Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur

Mohit Bhagchandani

The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events and/ or publicly available information. Any material borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.

As a part of Digital India initiative, the Indian government announced that it would provide free wifi to 1,050 villages in the next six months. The wifi hotspots will be mounted on towers so that maximum people can utilize this benefit. The Government has allocated Rs 420 crore for Digital Village Initiative and it aims to connect 900 million people in our country.

The aim of the government is to use digital technology to provide basic development services to rural areas, according to Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology official, Aruna Sundararajan as reported by CNN Money. There will be a vast number of service providers who will be providing their service for this initiative. In addition to this, common service centers will also be set up for different digital services like online forms filling, paying digitally and much more.

This initiative will also accelerate India’s transition to a digital economy following the demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes.Currently, Google is providing free wifi at 100 railway stations across the country and over 10 million people are using this service daily. Wifi hotspots may work as an alternative technology for providing the internet to all. If this plan becomes successful, it will be expanded to the rest of the country.

The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events and/ or publicly available information. Any material borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will try to break the record of Russia who sent 37 satellites into space in one go. ISRO is planning to send 103 satellites on a single rocket in the first week of February. The PSLV (C37) will carry all the 103 satellites, out of which 3 are Indian satellites and others are from rest of the countries, which will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andra Pradesh. According to Dr. K. Sivan, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, all the satellites will be separated in different directions from the launch vehicle such that none of them collides with one another and these separated satellites will move at a relative velocity of 1 metre per second. Russia launched 37 satellites simultaneously in 2014 and NASA sent 29 satellites in one go in 2013.

ISRO has done a phenomenal job in the area of space exploration and travel in the past few years because of the Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan and the low cost associated with it. The space industry of our country will get a boost as we will be earning additional revenue by carrying the satellites of other countries into space. So, if this mission also gets successful, ISRO will once again make its mark on the world and establish the fact that India is slowly getting to the level of developed countries and will provide a genuine threat to them in terms of technological advancement.